I greatly respect J. Christian Adams for the sacrifices he’s made in attempting to force reform of a lawless Justice Department, and as I noted myself on the fortieth anniversary, I agree that Apollo 8 was a great accomplishment, and actually the moment we won the space race in the sixties (the landing itself, a few months later, was actually more of a denouement in that regard). But I am saddened to say that as a space historian and policy analyst, he makes a good federal prosecutor.

First, he writes:

The profound achievement of Apollo 8 also validated the brilliance of American economic ingenuity. The space race was more than zesty public relations. Apollo 8 marked the moment we passed the Soviets. It really did demonstrate the greatness of a nation dedicated to free enterprise, where the lunar module was built by Grumman Corporation, the command module by North American Aviation, and the massive Saturn rockets built by Boeing and Douglas. Sure, the Treasury was purchasing the products at great expense, but the supply side of the equation was essentially a free market one, where the best competing ideas won the contracts. Plus, we could afford it while our competitor could not.

A chief reason the Soviet Union lost the race to the moon was because it didn’t have a free market system. Instead, it had a stagnant command bureaucracy that could occasionally produce results like Sputnik, but as we learned in the 1980s, could never overcome inherent flaws that stifled ingenuity in the long run.

Well, no. Not really. Apollo established the paradigm that NASA would design, develop, and operate its own vehicles, with the labor of contractors (our version of the Soviet design bureaus) on cost-plus contracts. The competition wasn’t based so much on competing ideas as on competing rates and locations.

It’s interesting to read the Space Act, the authorizing charter for the agency. Nowhere in it does it require that NASA itself perform human spaceflight. Prior to the decision to go to the moon, NASA had simply been a new version of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, its predecessor that had provided much of the key technology that had created the modern aviation industry, updated for space technologies. After the moon decision, NASA became our own version of the Soviets’ state socialist enterprise, with repercussions down to today, because it was considered a Cold War effort for which little could be left to chance, and the driving philosophy was to “waste anything except time.”

This was an effective way to beat the Soviets to the moon (though we were still lucky to some degree that we won — it could easily have gone the other way), but it was a terrible way to open up space, as evidenced by the fact that half a century later, we still haven’t done it.

But this next statement is quite frustrating, half a year after the new NASA policy was introduced:

Unfortunately, further manned space exploration was effectively killed in the 2011 NASA budget. This is a grave mistake. Not only does space provide unique solutions for problems here on Earth, such as growing perfect tissue cells for transplant research or other medical applications, it also has strategic importance.

… I recognize that NASA has many of the problems endemic to any government bureaucracy. But the answer is to reform NASA while pressing forward into space instead of killing off manned exploration.

Mr. Adams is assuming the proposition to be proved (i.e., “begging the question,” a phrase often misused by those who simply mean raising the question).

Leave aside the overhype about space applications for biology, and the lack of explanation of the strategic importance of human spaceflight. To state that the new NASA plans “kill off manned space exploration” is to state something that is, simply put, not true, and the prosecutor doesn’t even attempt to make a case for it.

It killed Constellation, yes, but Constellation was not identically equal to human spaceflight. As the Augustine panel pointed out last year, Constellation was a slow-motion programmatic train wreck. It was doomed to failure in any realistic budget environment, and putting it out of its and our misery ended the tragic waste of time and money that it was costing. Killing the program also allows us to get onto a track that actually holds some promise for getting us back to the moon and to other locations much sooner than Constellation ever could have (if it had done so at all).

Moreover, continuing on the past policy path would have meant many years of dependence on the Russians while waiting for the flawed Ares/Orion to be ready (2017 at the earliest), while ending participation in the International Space Station in 2016 (in other words, the new system wouldn’t be ready in time to even support it) with no other American means of getting to orbit. Now that’s what I call “ending US human spaceflight.” As I explained over three months ago in my glossary:

First of all, Constellation is not a replacement for the shuttle. It is both more and less than that. It replaces only the shuttle’s capability to get crew to and from orbit, and the lofting of large payloads, not its other features, such as payload return and orbital research and operations. And it is an entire architecture to get humans all the way to the lunar surface and back, something that the shuttle has never been able to do. And the total cost for Constellation is projected to be much greater than thirty billion. That price tag is for the Ares I rocket alone.

All of this mischaracterization and flawed reporting fuels hysterical and nonsensical cries of “the end of the U.S. human spaceflight program.”

In addition, it’s ironic that Mr. Adams mistakenly lauds the Apollo-era NASA as a paragon of free enterprise when in fact it was the opposite, as was Constellation, in which a few NASA personnel got together in a room, came up with a severely flawed technical concept, and then dictated to industry what they were going to build, after throwing out all of the competing studies that same industry had performed to determine the best way forward, none of whose concepts resembled Constellation.

In contrast, the new policy proposes that industry actually compete for NASA’s business to provide human spaceflight services, with multiple providers, so we are no longer in a situation in which we are dependent on the Russians when (as inevitably occurs, as it did twice with the Shuttle) the monolithic (and expensive) NASA system goes down.

In the new plan, NASA will no longer be spending all its scarce resources (and in the coming fiscal austerity, it’s a safe bet that those resources will be getting even more scarce) on developing an unnecessary new rocket and capsule for its own use to get to orbit. Instead, it will be purchasing that service at much lower cost, allowing it to focus its resources on actually sending people beyond earth orbit, and to do things that it hasn’t done before. \The new policy will actually allow NASA, finally, to live up to the model of free enterprise and competition that Mr. Adams mistakenly thought was in place for the past half century.

In fact, I predict that the next expedition to replicate the circumlunar voyage of Apollo 8 will be a private one, and that it will happen within a decade. Meanwhile, rather than repeating what it did forty-plus years ago with the low-risk (but high-cost) technologies represented by Constellation (aka “Apollo on Steroids,” but actually Apollo on Geritol), NASA will finally be going far beyond Apollo and getting on with true human deep-space exploration, while helping the rest of us get on with the actual development and settlement of space.

Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer and a consultant in space commercialization, space tourism and Internet security. He offers occasionally biting commentary about infinity and beyond at his weblog, Transterrestrial Musings.

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1.
Steve Skubinna

Well, I think J. Christian Adams had an interesting take on the Star Trek reboot.

I don’t disagree with much of this article. Private sector space exploration is obviously the ideal policy. But what NASA was able to do in 9 years, private efforts at space exploration haven’t come close in a much longer timeframe. There are some things that are ill suited for a primarily private sector approach, not many, but some. Militias would not have won the Civil War or WWII, and private efforts won’t get us to the moon in our lifetimes. Tanks and bombers cost a lot. Even Columbus knew he needed a King and Queen to make it happen. Some endeavors require such concentration of capital, and a steady stream of it. There have not been any significant private space exploration milestones reached yet. The private space effort is essentially at 1960 from NASA’s perspective. But I don’t disagree private exploration is a worthy aspiration.

Obviously you didn’t disagree with most of my piece. But instead took issue with my characterizataion of the death of manned space flight in the 2011 budget and my belief that freedom let us beat the Soviets to the moon.

On the latter point, you underestimate the impact freedom has on the marketplace of talent and ideas. There were brilliant engineers and ideas and a system to implement them because of our dynamic free economy. NASA engineers weren’t worried about midnight knocks at the door. NASA engineers went to college in an atmosphere of hope and limitless possibilities. That environment impacts what a nation can achieve. Perhaps I did not emphasize that point strongly enough. Even if NASA dictated the terms of the contract, there was a pool of energized and dynamic talent to fill the order. That was different in the Soviet Union.

Regarding the history of Constellation and whether man space flight is indeed killed, I will defer to you. I will only note that there is disagreement elsewhere with your characterization of the Constellation program’s effectiveness and potential. Of course since private space exploration appears to be your rallying cry, I think this article overlooks the fact that Apollo 8 was my focus and on those issues I presume we agree.

Let me expand upon that. The fact is that the Soviet space agency would have been able to achieve what NASA did had they had the private contractors available, and the entire private undergirding infrastructure to support the contractors. The Soviet top talent was as good at the American top talent. The difference was the entire industrial infrastructure, down to the rivet makers and the machine shops that make the hydraulic components and the electronic shops that make the avionics, the real success of the mission depended on good manufacturing and fabrication of the 1000s of mundane components that comprised the entire system.

If you’ve ever worked with Soviet-era equipment, you understand something that’s not obvious: that the entire economy is an interdependent ball of yard, and you can’t separate the pieces. The reason why they can’t make great aircraft in numbers (ever fly on a TU-154?) is that their government-made control apparatus and government-made landing gear and government-made engines, etc. are all inferior. The engines are inferior because they can’t get good parts from their suppliers. And so on. Every bit of inferiority of every part, be it a nut, a bolt, or a radar system compromises the quality of the overall system.

This is why, even with some of the best talent in the USSR (and before ~one million Jews emigrated to Israel they had an enormous amount of top-drawer talent), they couldn’t make a system that could safely get to the moon and back. It wasn’t for want of brilliance at the highest levels, it was for want of a good rivet and a good circuit board and a good hydraulic cylinder. These were the mundane things that the American private enterprise system furnished that allowed two Americans to walk on the moon in July, 1969.

The USSR was unable to mass produce quality products for the private sector,
such as aircraft, for the reasons you give.
The USSR was capable of producing small quantities of high tech items
by making design compromises, and ignoring cost, as in the case of the
Mig-25 fighter; The US experts mocked the Mig for not using flush rivets,
on surfaces not exposed to supersonic airflow, and using vacuum tubes in
the radar, which made it heavy, but also powerful enough to burn through
any jamming put out by its target, the US B-70 high altitude bomber.
The moon mission is in the second category, which means the USSR could
have succeeded, had it had a high enough priority.

There were brilliant engineers and ideas and a system to implement them because of our dynamic free economy. NASA engineers weren’t worried about midnight knocks at the door. NASA engineers went to college in an atmosphere of hope and limitless possibilities. That environment impacts what a nation can achieve. Perhaps I did not emphasize that point strongly enough. Even if NASA dictated the terms of the contract, there was a pool of energized and dynamic talent to fill the order. That was different in the Soviet Union.

It wasn’t sufficiently different that it made much difference in a space race between government programs. The Soviets had plenty of rocket talent, and if Korolev hadn’t died from botched colon surgery in 1966 (there’s probably some sort of weird ironic metaphor there) they may well have beaten us to the moon. The reason that they flew Apollo VIII in December (a gutsy move) was because they were afraid that the Soviets would beat us to a circumlunar trip with the Vostok (though admittedly, and ironically, they got fewer government resources than NASA did, and couldn’t develop the equivalents of the Saturn and J-2 engines).

The Soviets were unable to produce goods for their own people, but when it came to a government space or military program, they did fine, as long as they were willing to starve their own folks to pay for it. What happened in the eighties was that their collectivism was so sapping the vitality of the economy that they could simply no longer afford to play the military game. But as far as their space program goes, since the fall of the Soviet empire, the Russians have become avid capitalists. Half a century late, NASA would do well to emulate them in that regard.

What you’re saying is largely true, but they still had a disadvantage in the quality area. What they did was manufacture to loose standards, and then select the best for high priority (mostly military) applications, and then leave the junk for consumer products. Commercial aerospace is a good example of something that got less-than-top quality parts and engineering. This is why the Tupelovs were never competitive in the worldwide marketplace. They were good enough for Russia, but when Boeings were available, you’d be nuts to buy one. The fuel economy sucked, the take-off distance was longer, the specifications all around were inferior, and we’ll never know how many went down are were never reported.

Manufacturing quality does matter, and so far, command economies have shown themselves incapable of producing it, even in limited production. They fall way short of “just fine”; you just don’t know where the wreckage is buried. Doe that mean that they couldn’t have gotten lucky and put a man on the moon, and then got him back? No, but you don’t know that they didn’t try, and that there aren’t human remains on the moon, either.

“It wasn’t sufficiently different that it made much difference in a space race between government programs.”

Suggest you read less space history from the Soviet era from 1947 through to 1960 and more political/Gulag history. As someone pointed out, the mere ineptitude of industrial infrastructure caused by the command economy made the place an economic mess (eg. rivets). But Soviet brainpower, scientists (apart from your few examples to the contrary at the top of the foodchain) were repressed, oppressed, and lived in a state of insane totalitarian intimidation. These tactics started as far back as with Leon Theremin who was both a Soviet spy stealing avionics secrets from the USA, who upon his return to the USSR was tried (and confessed as so many falsely did) as a “fascist” and sentenced to a gulag, where he was then sent to the “scientists gulag” to develop soviet technology as a former real spy turned phony confessed fascists turned imprisoned R and D shop for the Motherland. The insane system continued through to the early 60s. Anyone who doesn’t think this madness didn’t affect industrial and scientific development has a seriously deficient understanding of history there.

Interesting discussion, si. The Soviets did depend a lot on stolen American technologies. The problem is that every thing we do is done by an individual rather than a group. What is done by a group it the melding of the individual efforts. R. G LeTourneau had a favorite quote, “Men can have what men produce.” When it is not produced it is not available at any price. It is like the many individual orchardist providing our supermarkets. Each orchardist is doing his best to produce good fruit at the best profit. When the government gets involved they stifle that individual initiative. You have touched on this several times and it is true. The individual has a personal interest in producing a quality product and his competitive position t move it. A bureaucrat has no competition to worry about. As long as he can please his boss he stays in business.

I have long wondered if we are trying to build another tower of Babel with our space program. It is an area where I have a great deal on interest that makes this report and the comments so interesting. Consider. With our current knowledge we know that it was not possible to build a tower such as described in Genesis so why create the confusion that stopped the project. I think there is a lot more to the story than we understand. With the government taxing away all our investment capital and restricting individual initiative it is very effective in blocking progress. You have your favorite interests and abilities and no one can manage that for you. You make this quite clear so if we get the government out of our billfold we will have the capital to pursue those interests. What made the roaring twenties roar? The crash of “29 was a financial crash due to financial mismanagement. It was not a failure of opportunity or market demand. In fact we were just on the edge of breaking technology that was hindered by our government compassion. The government and its bureaucrats have different interests so they will not be top performers in the necessary disciplines.

You miss the point about Soviet hardware, by judging it according to the specifications and requirements put out by American (and western European) users.
The Tu-154 (and especially the M variant) were highly effective aircraft for their role, superior in many regards to early model 727s and 737s which were their contemporaries.
They were never designed for the efficiency and cost effectiveness of their western counterparts, because those were never considerations in a communist system.
They were however designed to be rugged, easy to maintain under harsh conditions, and to effectively last. They were designed like that because they were intended for operation in primitive conditions, in the Siberian tundra, the steppes of Africa, from grass strips even and from airfields without massive infrastructure in maintenance facilities. If your mechanics have wrenches rather than electric screwdrivers, you’d best design your equipment to use nuts and bolts rather than screws.
They achieve those goals well, and those aircraft soldiering on in those harsh conditions when their western contemporaries have long since been sent to the scrapheap with fatigue cracks (and because they’re no longer economical to maintain and operate) is testament to that.

And yes, I’ve flown in Tupolevs and Ilyushins in the 1970s and ’80s. They were no better or worse for the passenger (except maybe a bit more vibration and noise) than Boeings and MDs of the day.

the government agencies …all of them start off to some degree responsible to the task in front of them.

but it doesn’t take long before bureaucracy starts to take over the projects and soon they become too bloated to function. NASA is an excellent example of this. “these people can not put a man on the moon …”

these bureaucracies are impossible to rein in or reform.

I see cutting 50 to 80% of the institutions and contract out services.

there are good I.G. but they are ignored, so although not everything is bad in government enough bad is there to prevent function.

It takes years to build a company competent in technology but only a few months of being idled to tear it all down. Now there isn’t the level of free market manufacturing in the United States there was in the ’60s to keep the companies alive while working with bureaucrats.

The business process that was introduced into Government/Industry contracting at the time NASA was established puts a lid on achievement and floor under costs. The NASA/Kennedy moon project replaced Air Force program that would have lead through the X-15 and SR71 technology to other space technology in three tech generations later a Moon landing in 1976. The new processes dictated that companies could not pay for new capabilities from the overhead of Government projects and reduce Operations to Programs and Programs to Projects. Very good for pencil pushing accountants and very very bad for the United States. The only thing to do is to terminate NASA and farm the whole thing out on a multi-year multi-supplier basis like the airmail before FDR.

I spent three years in the cape area between the Apollo and Shuttle programs. There was no way for talent to rise to the top within NASA. When Reagan got them the money for the Orient express direct to orbit program NASA deliberately squandered the money on concepts that would never work.

In space technology you can get twenty times the capability for twice the money but it takes years. Training a Kelly Johnson took from WWII to the 1960′s but destroying a Kelly Johnson takes only about a year because the government contra tor human resource departments write off people whose who become unemployed for any reason. The ability to maneuver in conjunction with the bureaucracy commands much more respect than does technical competency. Six persons as Government oversight per billion dollars of contract should be the maximum number of oversight personnel.

What NASA was able to do in 9 years, private efforts at space exploration haven’t come close to in a much longer timeframe.
BECAUSE
The primary mission of NASA has always been to _prevent_ the private sector
from _exploiting_ space for profit; Only those efforts approved by the US
government were allowed to proceed, with NASA in control, to ensure that
costs never came down to the point that private enterprise could compete.

An obvious example would be the effort by a Texas banker name Beale, which
failed because NASA’s subsidy exceeded his profit margin.

A less obvious example is space suit design, which was optimized for ease
of use by 50 year old Phd scientist/astronauts rather than 20 year old
construction workers building _very_ ‘High Iron’; A four hour prep for a
short spacewalk in a suit full of pure oxygen versus strapping on a suit
and heading out for eight strenuous hours of space station construction.

Mr. Adams,
Actually, most of the Civil War was fought and won by militias (as well as lost, the southern states had their own militias). The primary area in which state militias fell short was in sustaining heavy losses and still filling the ranks with new recruits, because while the states could not compel militia service, the Federal and Confederate governments could draft people into service, with the Feds having an advantage in that the primary receiving points of most immigrants were in the north, immigrants who could be quickly drafted into military service. That said, some would argue that had national governments been barred from imposing a draft, they’d be more inclined to resolving the central issues peacably, particularly the protectionist tariffs on British cloth made from southern cotton, as well as enacting sane slavery abolition laws that recognised (as British abolition laws did), the property interest of slaveholders and which complied with Constitutional protections against uncompensated eminent domain or other seizures. What the Civil War was really about was northern industrialists were too cheap to pay for the legal and constitutional eminent domain and manumission of slaves according to property law and sought to steal the property rights of southerners without just compensation. The British, conversely, paid for the manumission of all slaves in Britain. This is called putting your money where your mouth is.

But hey, don’t let me stop you from using the largest theft of privaty property by the federal government in US history as an example for justifying big government action as a good thing.

You are assuming that the Southern slaveholding aristocracy would have accepted compensation for manumission. Their increasingly hysterical responses to criticism suggest otherwise – by 1860 they were prepared to go to the mat to defend their Peculiar Institution.

And don’t mask the abhorrent and indefensible practice of slavery with neutrally bland terms such as “property rights.” That’s vile and disgusting. So far as I’m concerned the only recompense a slaveholder deserves is a bullet in the head.

Exactly. I was a U.S. government contracting officer, warrant and all. While there’s a great deal of skill involved in program management, this article does a disservice to the ingenuity, flexibility, and dedication of the private sector.

“The LEM was built by Grumman Aircraft Engineering and was chiefly designed by the American aerospace engineer, Tom Kelly.[4] Grumman had begun lunar orbit rendezvous studies in late 1950s and again in 1962. In July 1962, eleven firms were invited to submit proposals for the LM. Nine did so in September, and Grumman was awarded the contract that same month. The contract cost was expected to be around $350 million.”

I know because I worked at Grumman in the summer of 1969, when their LEM landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, and I have the lapel pin to prove it!

Perhaps you can help restore a fogged memory;
Was it Grumman who just barely lost out in the STS design competition,
due to slightly higher cost, and lower payload, in spite of offering
guaranteed crew survival at all points from launch to orbit ?

The burning question in these times is, “Should be support a constitutional amendment to authorize something like NASA?” My answer is yes, I do support “something like NASA”, and also basic research as a function of the Federal Government. But until we get the amendment, the current regime is unconstitutional – unless NASA is considered part of the military.

P.S. One of my favorite Federal agencies is NIST, which has a clear constitutional mandate (weights and measures), and necessarily involves cool research.

Personally I think the Space Shuttle killed the highly focused, highly competent, “Failure is not an option” NASA from the 60′s. People forget that there had been a number of options for at least a partially reusable launch system, and the least interesting, and supposedly cheapest design was picked. Unfortunately, it was a crap design than ended up needing a lot more of those infamous tiles than was originally planned, as well as being both a money pit and an inherently an unsafe design to boot — later estimates had the odds of a deadly failure at 1% per launch. (WTF!?!? — it was suppose to be a space truck.)

Chronic problems with the Shuttle sucked the life and energy out of NASA and did major damage to its image. And then they shot themselves in the other foot when they later ignored everyone’s advice to create a simple, much more cost effective, unmanned heavy lift vehicle for stuff not needing human pilots, even though they could have inexpensively used the Soviet/Russian Energia booster, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union: that would have been a great start for new ties between the US and the new Russia. But noooo….NASA had already transitioned from a “Can do, let’s do” agency to a “Scratch butt and smell finger” disconnected mess. It’s friggin 2010 — who would ever have guessed 40 year ago that we would never even return to the moon after the early 70′s, never mind not making it to Mars? And with the sad ass Shuttle program now history, we’re ironically now dependent on the Russians and their rusty old facilities.

Have to agree with BC on this. A little while after the Lunar era the wheels came off NASA and it became just another government bureaucracy, with hyper-emphasis on safety and redundancy, and zero tolerance for “risk”. What it became was inevitably bankrupt and unsuccessful. I appreciate Simberg’s input but don’t completely buy into his Sovietological views.

What comes across as a personal preference for Soviet technology. Yes, they had a lot of talent from the former German program, but that advantage was married to a system taking technological shortcuts that when they failed, and that was often, tended to suck the life out of everything it touched. Not saying NASA’a way was better, but it was free-er.

Robert A. Heinlein, the legendary American science fiction writer – whose stories inspired many of the engineers and scientists who made the American space program possible – once remarked that he KNEW that he would live to see the FIRST moon landing but had never in his wildest dreams imagined that he would also live to see the LAST moon landing. That’s how disappointed he was that Apollo moon landings were not followed up within his lifetime. He died in 1988 and I am even more disappointed that we STILL haven’t gone back to the moon and don’t even have any detailed plans to do so.

I’m so confused. If this article was intended as a refutation of Christian Adam’s article about Apollo 8, why title it “Repeating Myths of a Flawed NASA Past: Free enterprise had nothing to do with the U.S. getting to the moon ahead of the Russians.” That’s indendiary. If not free enterprise, then what? Socialism? Superior government employees?

I suspect the answer to this disagreement could be gleaned from your response to this question: “If NASA had not taken Americans into space, would Americans have gone up there anyway?” Clearly, the answer is a matter of opinion. I believe we would have, that NASA provided guidance and organization, not ingenuity or technology. But if you believe “No NASA, no space”, well, you’re entitled to your opinion.

I suspect the answer to this disagreement could be gleaned from your response to this question: “If NASA had not taken Americans into space, would Americans have gone up there anyway?” Clearly, the answer is a matter of opinion. I believe we would have, that NASA provided guidance and organization, not ingenuity or technology. But if you believe “No NASA, no space”, well, you’re entitled to your opinion.

False choice. I believe “No NASA, farther ahead in space than we currently are.” We wouldn’t have prematurely sent a few astronauts to the moon in the sixties, but we’d probably have private facilities in orbit by now (as we will in a few years anyway), with affordable reusable transportation, and plans for private lunar trips as well. Apollo was an historical anomaly in the context of the Cold War that had little to do with actually opening up space for serious exploration and development.

I worked for Boeing on the Saturn V from 1966 through 1974. NASA did not design the Saturn V. Either Boeing did or the Germans did. NASA paid the bills, made/approved big decisions, and cracked the whip.

Some folks need to re-read their early NASA HSF history. Yes, the vehicles were detail designed and built by free enterprise. NASA decided what they would build – not just top level requirements, but ‘it must be a capsule of these dimensions, using these materials, with these systems, etc.’ They discarded three perfectly good Apollo design studies. The original winning contractor (Martin) was the one that gave the best bid to build what NASA had already decided they wanted – anything else went straight into the circular out file. Mercury, Shuttle, Orion – same story right down the line. Sounds like central planning to me.

The point is the industrial infrastructure to build the contract – if just specifying what you need could complete a project then the Russians would have finished the race – but the American free enterprise system produced sub-contractor and suppliers at each level that could and have successfully produced the contract requirements – if just specifying your requirements would work – maybe the contract requirements should have been written by science fiction writers. The free enterprise system has build in feedback at every level of production. The Russians operated under the handicap of requiring the management to see every possible problem in production and every consequence of that problems solution. You of course have just said that you think that the NASA engineers did exactly that. If they did, then they probably added a line item to take care of chainsaw production so that a logger in Alabama would have a new chainsaw for cutting pine trees need to produce a chemical used to clean bolts for stress testing by a Grumman sub-contractor. The Russians didn’t see that so the old chainsaw was not replaced, production of the chemical was down, there was no way to clean the bolds – so they didn’t test them.

It is true, as Simberg says, that NASA’s Constellation moon project was an utterly incompetent conception and a fiasco, and it deserved to die on the pad with a self-destruct order. And space *exploration* should be private, though there are legitimate and essential military applications in space. But the article’s author errs gravely in diminishing the role of private enterprise in the success of the Apollo program, which rested entirely on the creative spirit and inventiveness of free individuals functioning in a private industry. Without that, we never would have made it to the moon. Period.

You can debate how “private” any industry is in the United States, today or in the 1960′s, especially the defense industry that made Apollo. But statism doesn’t create **anything**. Force and mind are opposites: nothing was ever *created* by pointing a gun at someone. Acts of creation only come from the reasoning minds of individuals who are free to grasp reality and act on their judgment, according to their convictions and motivations about what it good and true and right. Those acts don’t happen by threatening someone; such acts are always on the *premise* of a free market — ie, capitalism — ie, a system that protects the rights of the individual — even if they occur in a *system* that mixes some freedom with some controls — eg, the United States today, what Ayn Rand described as a “mixed economy” — a mixture of freedom and statism (see her books, Capitalism the Unknown Ideal, or The New Left: the Anti-Industrial Revolution).

What made Apollo work was not the statists, ie, not the NASA bureaucrats: it was a lot of people in private industry who believed that in using their minds to solve the problems of building a rocket, they were defending freedom (remember the “space race”?), opposing communism, pursuing adventure, seeking knowledge, taking heroic risks (“boldly going…”) and doing something noble and good, even if, in the long run, by acting on behalf of government control of space they were destroying the future of space travel. People of confused premises but a lot of self-interest.

Let’s say it again: Apollo would *not* have succeeded if NASA had designed it. It succeeded because there were a lot of free people who believed they were doing good while earning a profit in support of it.

Creation is not an attribute of government. It is an attribute of free people. Ie, private enterprise. Government, in its only proper, limited function (the military, the police, the courts), simply *preserves* the good and noble and right — which is important! — but it doesn’t create things. The success of a statist endeavor (any illegitimate function of government) does not mean that statists accomplished it; it means you have to discover the free minds who endeavored to accomplish it.

Even the Soviet space program was a product of free enterprise. Apart from the fact that they stole most of their technology from us, to the extent you could find any scientist and engineer over there with an original thought, such people were acting on the *premise* of a free society (however misplaced, misguided or mercenary their intentions), even if the society they lived in wasn’t free. Such people were the only ones keeping that communist trainwreck moving, and such people are the only ones keeping a mixed economy such as our own moving. (What Rand called “the sanction of the victim”.)

This is the contradiction of anyone who chooses to serve an illegitimate function of the state — that is, any function not directly serving the protection of individual rights: they are enabling their own destroyers and enslaving everyone else around them. Like the physicist Robert Stadler in Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged”, whose advocacy of the oligarchic State Science Institute (a prescient predecessor to NASA) made him the destroyer of all science. Like anyone who places their free mind in the service of statism — they are destroying freedom and everything else made possible by it.

When someone holds irrational ideals — like “might makes right / the government must use coercion to do good / we have to seize everyone’s money and force them to do the ‘right thing’” — to the extent they act to use their mind to grasp the relationships of reality and choose a course of action to achieve some goal (however noble or not), they are acting in contradiction to that irrational ideal. They are acting, on the one hand, on the premise of a free man, a free market and a free country when they use their minds to create a remarkable machinery that puts human beings on the moon; on the other hand, when they put their minds in service to an organization that usurps the prerogatives of private enterprise with extorted taxes (NASA), they are acting on the premise of a common gunman, whose only form of “creation” is a heist. In that role, they are henchman to the godfather of the state.

Private enterprise made Apollo possible; but the state destroyed space travel.

How many men has NASA put into orbit on the X-33? NASA spent more of our money on that than Musk has spent of his own money. But Elon Musk put something into orbit, and is still making progress toward his goal. NASA gave up.

1. The first American astronauts went into space on Redstone, Jupiter, and then Atlas rockets, which were developed for the military, before NASA was formed. NASA’s first try, the Vanguard was an abject failure

2.The Soviet program chief,Korolyov, was a more outstanding rocket developer, than his American counterparts. Individual genius and capability is much more important than the articles stress on political systems indicates.

NASA largely became the moster it did because of the incredibly capable and deft political machinations of one man, Dr. James Webb. He perhaps even exceeds Dr. Werner Von Braun for sheer impact on NASA’s success. BUT, the real reason we beat the Reds was even simpler. Tey did not have a NASA equivilant. They had about 1/3 the resources of the USA and theymade them compete instead of work together. Glushko, Mishin, Tupolev and Korolev were often at each others throats (with Korolev being chucked in a GULAG because his rival’s bogus accusations). Korolev, the closest hing toa Von Braun the Reds had, died from a botched surgery atthe hieght of the space race. This effectively ended teh Soviet’s chances at winning the moon race.

Elon Musk was not the topic of discussion. Pretending that SpaceX is the only potential commercial provider, and ignoring the United Launch Alliance, or Boeing (which has built every manned space system that NASA has contracted), is one of the many foolish straw men that opponents of the new policy put up. And such a pretense (particularly when SpaceX will be launching and recovering a pressurized crew capsule in a few weeks) is at this point trollery.

When private space enterprise goes into orbit, and obviously outdoes NASA,
the fallback position will be to criticize every failure, particularly every
fatality, in order to invalidate the successes; Watch and see.

Further and more, when China goes into space, for both commercial and
military reasons, as per their publicly stated policy, and the Witch Hunt
begins in the US for those who ‘Lost Space’ just as it did before for those
who ‘Lost China’, the critic will be nowhere to be found.

While I enjoy rehashing the history of technological progress
as much as anyone, right at the moment, with the US facing a
Double-Dip Recession without a recovery = 2nd Great Depression,
I am far more interested in the future creation of wealth in
LEO, and beyond, by profit-motivated private enterprise, using
designs which have been proven, and priced out, and need only
be realized, which will never happen as long as NASA continues
to act as the government’s very own roadblock to space.

Ah, low earth orbit is not going to (or returning to) the moon. Private enterprise is only going to low earth orbit, because the state (NASA) will fund it, not because it’s a self financing destination resort. Private enterprise will not go to the moon because it does not have the deep pockets to do it, it has no cheaper way of doing it, and there has yet to be any demonstrable economic payoff for going to the moon. Such risky endeavors have historically been funded by state enterprise, and then privatized. NASA made it to the moon because it was also embedded within a wider free enterprise economy–which certainly could not be said of the Soviet Union. Once the current space station is obsolete, I suspect manned flight to low earth orbit will no longer be justified as a state expense. At which point private enterprise will not be returning to the space station. It’s quite obvious the current political elite, and you, are more interested in Potempkin social welfare projects on earth, preventing carbon dioxide “pollution,” rather than going to the moon to discover something that could possibly be economically and technologically significant.

The design studies for Solar Power Satellites are all done;
They were a money-making proposition 20 years ago, when NASA
told Congress that the key technological element, a cheap,
light weight microwave transmitter, ‘needed more work’.

The design studies for a lunar colony are all done;
$10B will cover the whole thing, unless NASA gets
to write the safety requirements and the legal liability
clause, etc. ad nauseum until the proposal dies.

Fine, if what you say is true, then private enterprise should have been on the moon twenty years ago. The propulsion technology has been around for 40 years. However, as I recall the solar cell technology twenty years ago required the solar cell to operate for thirty years before finally producing the energy it took to make the solar cell in the first place; hardly an economical proposition, regardless of microwave beam efficiency and Nasa personnel inflight safety standards. Again, if it was so profitable and such a possible great going concern, private enterprise would have used those moon base designs, been there already, done it, and on the way to Mars. Ain’t gonna happen, not without more public investment. There is no current cheap way to get to the moon and beyond, and in regards to the Orion program expense is a bogus issue for canceling it.

It was also technically “illegal” to sail west, until the Spanish Crown, with visions of gold, God, and glory, authorized Columbus to go, and provided the money to do so. Not particularly hung up on legalities, the Norse Vikings had already done it and died, apparently at the hands of the indigenous “nobel savages.” Again, if the moon and mars we’re the 21st century version of Sutter’s Mill, California, 1848, the laws would have been changed yesterday. Who do you think writes those laws for a congress who doesn’t read them?

“The design studies for a lunar colony are all done; $10B will cover the whole thing”

Not in todays dollars, and I’m assuming you mean that is the cost for only the lunar colony, and not R&D, manufacturing or transportation costs.

I’ve been working on a proposal for a $10B mission that uses existing technologies and systems, and so far I’m at almost $7B just for two round trips to L1 using ISS components. And I use Dragon flights for crew to keep costs down, as well as existing launchers for cargo.

As a comparison, ULA has a study called “Affordable Exploration Architecture 2009″ that goes into great detail about how they would create a permanent colony on the Moon, with 120 day crew rotations. To support the first year of manned operations on the Moon, they proposed one year of prepositioning. Adding up years one & two, they foresee the need for 52 launches of their ACES type vehicles, which can be used as tankers, EDS and landers. Your $10B would not even cover the cost of the launchers, sans payloads.

The Moon is doable, even with existing launchers, but it is far from inexpensive, and certainly not in the $10B range.

Look, until someone figures out how to make a good profit going to the moon — and I don’t mean BS profits like space tourism — the only trips made there are going to be government funded. The profits better be ginormous too, given all the potential legal liability generated by our malfunctioning judicial system as well as modern government’s urge to regulate everything in sight. During the great age of privately funded European exploration, the nations of Europe, even though on paper they were much less democratic than today’s, in practice were much more friendly to entrepreneurial exploits because no one had yet invented all the methods and attitudes twentieth century governments use to stifle innovation and capitalist enterprise.

To my mind the most likely spur for future large-scale space exploration lies in the search for large meteors and asteroids that look like they may pass dangerously close to earth. Then, after a technology has been developed to divert dangerous space rocks into safer orbits, some military genius will point out what a great weapon it would be to divert smaller, less destructive space debris into precise, nation-destroying orbits. As an added bonus –no radioactivity afterwards! Then a great military space race will begin, as every industrialized nation attempts to seize control of space rocks whose orbits can be easily diverted to earth. Now that’s a motive guaranteed to open wide the government’s purse strings and send terrestrial spacecraft to every corner of the solar system. The only way this doesn’t happen is if a world government is formed, which would handle this potential problem by discouraging space flight. The logic of this scenario suggests that those who are in favor of world government and space exploration desire mutually exclusive goals. Waging war — and this sort of militarized exploitation of space would most definitely be a life or death type of cold-war weapons race because the threat is so deadly — is one of the few things that government does well.

The cost for a moon colony is $10B; There are private individuals
who could fund one for the fun of it, for the publicity, and as a high
risk investment _IF_ the State allows, which, if it happens, will happen
only when the State really, really, needs new wealth creation, like now.

Explain the portion about free enterprise when the only way the commerical venture survives is through government funding? That right – paid for by stimulus and other tax payer dollars and in some cases without a competive bid, just the pork written in the stimulus bill to Obama’s Billion Club. What true private enterprise would invest in a venture that has little chance for profit for decades and great risks? The whole commerical versus NASA space exploration debate is a joke!

I’m shocked that no one ever mentions the biggest distortion created by a politicized space program–the International Space Station. Even in Rand’s discussions, everything revolves around access to and from the ISS on different schedules. Who cares? A terrorist who shot that white elephant out of the sky would do more for rational progress in space flight (private and public) than 100 Augustine commissions.

Agreed. Fully. The ISS is one helluva lot of money for a bunch of politicians and itinerant scientists to accomplish absolutely … nothing.

My entire life, I’ve loved the idea of going into space. But by sucking every dollar out of the private sector and monopolizing the utilization of outer space for political reasons, the government has destroyed almost any prospect of a private space program. What Musk and Rutan have accomplished, considering the obstacles, is remarkable. They should have much more money at their disposal — but the government taxes all private business into profitlessness for social programs and boondoggles such as NASA, who consistently spend 100 times as much to accomplish something that the private sector would. Who has the excess money to put into risky ventures?? No one. Venture capital in this country has almost been destroyed by government policy — it’s been reduced to short term lending, not long-term risk-taking.

I’ll relate a story about NASA: my father was an engineer working on my advanced systems in the 60′s and 70′s — he designed the first of more than a few things that are now taken for granted for fighters, missiles, ABM, Trident. I won’t say what to keep this anonymous. He did some work in support of NASA and frequently went to Huntsville and other NASA installations, including to watch missile tests. After Apollo 1 disaster and before Apollo 11 he said — NASA was the biggest bunch of bunglers on the planet, and if we got to the moon it would be nothing short of a miracle.

Well, we did it, but that was the 60′s, when there were SOME competent people there and a lot more competent people in private industry. Today? Don’t kid yourself. It is an organization that has destroyed two space shuttles, accidentally crashed probes into Mars (when it wasn’t supposed to), sent up a billion dollar telescope with bad optics, operates a completely useless and incomplete space station at an absurd expense, employs a dishonest crook (James Hanson) to promote a bogus theory (AGW), and now has, as it’s primary mission “muslim outreach”. Incompetent bunglers doesn’t begin to cover the adjectives for these people.

So if NASA at one time in the distant past actually accomplished something — the amazing thing about a dancing elephant isn’t that it dances well, it’s that it could even stand up on its hind legs.

No, the US won because the US got incredibly lucky.
The Soviets had a few catastrophic launch failures at just the right time to get their politicians to question the validity of their moon program and start micromanaging it (which in their culture meant sending people to the Gulag…).
Think what would have happened to the US program if the Apollo 1 fire had been followed by 2 Saturn Vs exploding on the launch pad during or prior to launch.
It would have been set back by years, maybe cancelled.

I don’t understand your “_IF_the State allows”. If done privately, why is it necessary that this moon colony originate from the United States? What is stopping you and like minded entrepreneurs from forming your own lunar version of the “United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies”? Sure it would be more difficult outside the US, but there have got to be several countries who would welcome the endeavor (for a cut of the profits, perhaps).

Access to space is regulated by all sorts of international treaties, including who owns what and where.
As such, the US government would be responsible legally for everything launched from their soil.
Were a private rocket to crash in say Venezuela after being launched from the US, the US government would have to pay for the destruction.

A privately owned and operated space habitat might not even be possible under those treaties, unless it were officially a legal entity of the country launching it.

The UN has effectively divided space between its member governments the way the Vatican in the middle ages gave half of south America to Spain and the other half to Portugal (which is the reason Brazil now speaks Portuguese).

NASA is a socialist/social program its demise is fitting as a bureaucracy. It is that simple.

I will also say that the Russian socialist space program accomplished more private launches than NASA has or ever will(hopefully). The following link is a reliability study USSR 2589 successful launches 181 failures, USA 1,152 successful launches 164 failures. Do people get this? USSR program succeed over twice as much and had half the percentage of failure. source: http://www.aero.org/publications/crosslink/winter2001/03_table_1.html

The biggest problem with the U.S. space program is the inability to make the vision decision and maintain the vision and budget to accomplish it over a period of years and decades.

In my humble opinion, Constellation was a viable, perhaps even outstanding program for the vision and design requirements, and design constraints imposed upon it. Part of the issue with it’s requirements and constraints is the desire to be risk averse at the design stage far beyond the requirements imposed on the moon race hardware or space shuttle. Lessons learned from the shuttle apparently (and if I were an astronaut justifiably) driving the safety side, but programmatic risks were also to be avoided. This led to the architecture of modified and updated shuttle based solid rockets, and a modified Apollo rocket motor, along with a new capsule, lunar lander, etc. In other words, an approach of incrementalism. Add to this a failure to fund at anticipated levels, and the failure of the government to put plans clearly in place to operate the space station (ISS) beyond 2015, and you are left with a program already behind schedule due to funding having to share out of the same pot of money with the ISS.

In any event, we could have (perhaps should have) decided to go with the so-called commercial space route to replace the shuttle’s LEO mission a decade ago, or left space to the entrepreneurial proclivities of the market and people like Richard Branson, Burt Rutan, and others. My belief is that there is some appropriate role for government spending on technology, including space and space exploration technologies. If there were not potential strategic and national defense consequences I would likely fall back to my preference for letting the free market more fully control and fund these efforts.

So as I said it gets back to selecting a vision. I believe any vision for manned space exploration really does require a destination (or specific series of destinations) with rationales as to the importance of those destinations and aspirational time goals. It is in the effort to meet those destinations in those time frames that the technical requirements (the subset of technology pieces needed to complete the vision) are identified at the program initiation and discovered as the inevitable “unknown unknowns” are faced. It is nice to say we will spend the time and money to develop a set of technologies to someday go somewhere, but that risks developing technologies that may not be needed to accomplish the vision or to not see the need of a specific program that will be needed ahead of time.

In summary, I believe the proposal put forth by the current administration probably does effectively end the U.S. manned space exploration for the foreseeable future because it lacks the definitions of place and time needed, and because it continues the pattern of developing a new vision every five to seven years. There has been some compromise with the Senate that may improve the situation, but the House has a separate plan and some commentators have indicated that these options may continue the mismatch of funding as compared to mission.

yah, but instead we’re sending them video messages from Jim Hanson telling them they should feel good about their past and present scientific contributions (which are of course as valid as Hanson’s own, so it is a fitting job for the crook).

daleg said
“In my humble opinion, Constellation was a viable, perhaps even outstanding program…”
It’s amazing how often people keep slipping back into the “Constellation was OK” position inspite of everything that has been established as wrong with the program.
So I think it’s worth sticking another stake into the heart of the beast.
Augustine said it was unaffordable.
The GAO said every year for years that it was too expensive. ($30B was the est in 2008 for Ares 1 alone).
To see what a reasonable program should cost look at the EELVs.
The Air Force put up $1B and Boeing and LM picked up the remainder of the tab, Less than (or around) $3B each. To develop 2 new LV’s for $6B would be a bargain. In fact the airforce put up just $1B. Good value.
Now look at COTS. For $278M (not Billion) NASA gets a new LV (Falcon 9) AND a new capsule (Dragon) and for another $171M (again not Billions) NASA gets the Taurus II launch vehicle AND the Cygnus spacecraft. Again the bulk of the costs (including launch infrastructure) is picked up by SpaceX and Orbital respectively.
Any way you want to compare these figures against the estimated cost of Ares 1 or even just the money already spent on Ares 1 ($10B) it is obvious the Constellation program was a disaster. Orion requirements kept changing as the Ares 1 capabilities kept shrinking. The Altair lander was dropped as funds vanished into Ares 1 and Ares V receded over the economic horizon.
All this is detailed in Sally Rides report to the Augustine committee. Watch the video.
It’s terrifying.
Killing Constellation was the only option.

Yes, I’m sure you’re correct. I’m also sure the moon program of the sixties was no more expensive, adjusted for inflation; the physics of getting to the moon doesn’t change. However, Americans made it to the moon in ten years while fighting the cold war, the Vietnam War, and wasting billions on the Great Society programs, the costs of which are still accumulating. When JFK announced going to the moon, the Feds were not in hock for trillions to bail out private sector banks, in hock for trillions to a mortgage market and American public also in hock for trillions. In 1962 to get a no down mortgage loan you actually had to be a military veteran, but by 2002 any Tom Dick and Jane could get a no down liars loan for a home. The debt finance bubble popped. The current political wisdom is that more social welfare deficit spending is required to stimulate the economy at the expense of that “expensive” retro moon program that just so happened to be, ewe, a shovel ready Bush program. One can either divide up the economic pie, “share the wealth,” and stick around on an increasingly inhospitable earth, or you can fund manned space exploration and create new wealth in an infinite universe. With the eastern Med tied up by the Muslims, the silk and spice roads east closed, the Spanish Crown decided to have Columbus sail west to get to the east. The world’s never been the same, and the current administration certainly doesn’t have the risk taking proclivities of Isabel of Spain.

No human has ever been to the moon. Everything one sees on TV is not true. Moon landings were one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated.

Why has nobody been back there in over 40 yrs? Thankfully this hoax will eventually have an expiration date, say the 50 anniversary or maybe the 100th anniversary? When will people realize and accept that it was nothing more than a hoax? Man will never walk on the moon “again” in our lifetimes simply because humans don’t have the technology to do it.

Where is the kodak film that could withstand 250 degree heat and 250 cold? You know NASA claims to have lost ALL of the original film footage from those “walks”. How could they loose a national treasure?

‘In fact, I predict that the next expedition to replicate the circumlunar voyage of Apollo 8 will be a private one, and that it will happen within a decade.’

The former _might_ be true, depending on how things shake out. The later is almost certainly a pipe-dream. I’m not happy about that, but that’s the way things are.

‘NASA will finally be going far beyond Apollo and getting on with true human deep-space exploration, while helping the rest of us get on with the actual development and settlement of space.’

Not unless significant changes occur in the political and administrative structures of the USA in that time period. Obama is deeply hostile to space exploration, and so are most liberal Democrats, while the GOP is indifferent (with individual exceptions). Culturally, the United States is simply not in an expansionist or exploratory mood right now, and the money situation is so bad that a good case can be made that there’s no money to do anything anyway. NASA is an arm of the government, whether it’s being run for a goal as in the sixties, or in classic bureaucratic style as a self-sustaining
engine as it has been since the 70s. As long as the government is run by people either ideologically hostile to space exploration, or indifferent to it, NASA will not be doing anything much different than it has been doing.

Looking to the private sector to handle the matter is also a day-dream. _There’s no monetary motive._ I’m not saying it’s impossible to make money in space, I’m quite certain that in time, fortunes will be made there. But there’s no visible, reasonable source of profit for a plausible business model right now, within the range of resources and operational scale possible to most private entities. Those ideas that have been suggested have mostly not worked out, or are utterly impractical, or require levels of capital investment that only the government can access.

In short, for the foreseeable future either the government takes the lead in space exploration, esp. manned activity, or it simply does not get done. I’m not any happier about that than most, but it’s reality. Further, that neglects the fact that NASA and other government organs are in fact hostile to the idea of private space development, so the actual situation is worse than the theoretical one.